


We are Timeless

by CmonCmon



Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Clint Is a Good Bro, Coffee, Domestic Avengers, Multi, Reflection, Sparring
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-04
Updated: 2017-01-13
Packaged: 2018-09-14 20:21:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9200966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CmonCmon/pseuds/CmonCmon
Summary: Inspired by a Bland Marvel Headcanon, Steve, Natasha, and Bucky look at the ties that bind them





	1. Steve

**Author's Note:**

> I lurk the Bucky/Nat tag kind of a lot. You're all wonderful. 
> 
> I mashed up some comicverse to fill in some things the movieverse hasn't settled yet in order to make this work. 
> 
> The Bland Marvel Headcanon that got the ball rolling [here](http://blandmarvelheadcanons.tumblr.com/post/102401948683/after-spending-some-time-around-captain-rogers)  
> Title from the Airborne Toxic Event song

“You’ve never noticed?” Clint’s tone was enough. Steve didn’t take the time to look at him to see the disbelief.

“What’s to notice?” he asked, arm draped around the heavy bag, leaning into it like a hug. “They train together.” His eyes were on Bucky and Nat, sparring lightly across the gym. It was more cat and mouse, more of a dance. Circle, advance, engage, retreat. Bucky did always like to dance with a redhead.

“And you’ve never noticed when she falls into her stance?” Clint leaned harder into the bag, but it barely moved against Steve’s counterweight.

“It’s a stance. I don’t know what you’re…” Steve was going to say he had no idea what Clint was talking about. Seeing the details was Clint’s thing. It wasn’t just his perfect vision, but the way he seemed to absorb the world around him. Of course he might see something Steve missed. Not that Steve was oblivious, but no one was like Clint. 

Except, now watching them like he was, he saw it. Even if he didn’t want to admit it, he knew exactly what Clint meant. The way Natasha reset, with a roll of her lead shoulder and a cock of her head to the right. It was just loosening up. Everyone did that. But there was something else in it. It looked just enough like an invitation, a dare.

He could feel every muscle of his own respond to it. 

“Oh, now you notice,” Clint snorted.

Steve knew that stance. It was his. But, it also wasn’t. 

It was second-hand. Like so many other things from his life before. He had been a scrawy kid back in Brooklyn, practicing it in front of the bathroom mirror, trying to look big and confident. Trying to convince the bullies that the blows didn’t hurt him. Trying to look like Buck. 

“Well, until you pointed it out…” Steve shrugged like it didn’t matter. “Guess she picked it up.”

“But that’s what I’m saying, I was making myself crazy with those things.” Clint laughs like it’s funny, but Steve feels the weight in his stomach sink another few inches.

“Things?” The question doesn’t come out lightly. It lands with the same force Bucky does after the hip toss, but it doesn’t roll nearly as gracefully.

Clint makes a little annoyed sound in the back of his throat when Nat misses the leg sweep and hits the mat next to Bucky. “Little stuff,” he picks up the conversation. “But I knew she didn’t get ‘em from you. She holds cards like you, with her pinky sticking out. Better at poker, for sure, but still, same thing. Made no sense, since I saw her doin’ those things before you were even out of the ice…”

Clint was still talking, but Steve’s attention narrowed to the sparring. Clint was only talking to keep him company. The archer was a world silence champion when he wanted to be. He was talking until Steve got the point.

He’d gotten it.

Bucky was hard-wired into Nat. While Steve’s life had been frozen in place, Bucky had lived in moments, and those moments had been with Natasha.

The sparring continued across the room. The dance had a faster pace now. Almost elegant. Two people who knew each other inside out, darting, moving, anticipating. 

Bucky wasn’t just pulling his punches, he was leading with his metal arm, keeping it up like a shield. That way, he’d never do more than a jab with it. Never hurt her. They moved across the mat again, quick, careful, and lethal. Like they knew every move the other body was making. Like they could read each other’s minds.

Steve didn’t wish his best friend had simply lost decades of time like he had. His own fate had been a cruel trick of nature and chemistry. 

That didn’t make having a best friend with a new best friend any easier. 

Steve turned to say something about how they should get back to work to Clint, but the other side of the heavy bag was already empty.

Of course it was.


	2. Natasha

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Bland Marvel Headcanon that got the ball rolling [here](http://blandmarvelheadcanons.tumblr.com/post/102401948683/after-spending-some-time-around-captain-rogers)  
> Title from the Airborne Toxic Event song

If she stacked up all of their moments, the ones she could remember and the ones he could, James wouldn’t have touched her as many times as she touched Steve in a week.

Not that all touches were the same, but that wasn’t the point of keeping score. 

Not that she was keeping score.

What kind of person would keep score of the number of times her formerly-brainwashed lover casually touched his long-lost best friend? A terrible one.

She turned the page she was supposedly reading, just in case either of them remembered she was still in the room. Even if he hadn’t looked her way after a nod on his arrival to the communal living room, she knew he tracked her. It was what they had learned. 

It was what he had taught her.

It was better and worse when it was just the three of them. She liked Steve more than most humans. He’d be near the top if she tried to rank them, but really a bit of her liked him like one would a favorite pet. His lack of artifice was such a contrast to the rest of her life, in and out of her web, only he could be so very honest and yet so much trouble.

And yet. 

She made a hum in her throat and moved her gaze to the opposite page, sinking deeper into the cushions of the couch she was sprawled out on.

It was only her natural observational skills that informed her James had initiated physical contact seven times in this conversation alone. They were all insignificant contact; a playful shove, a hand on his arm, an arm around his shoulders. It wasn’t jealousy. She didn’t want those touches instead of Steve. She wanted them as well. 

James had been a North Star for her first twenty years. As a child, she’d held him up as an ideal of what service and commitment to the cause could bring her. As a teenager, he’d been her rock star, her hollywood heart throb. He had represented all the things she’d wanted to be, all the things she’d wanted to achieve and everything she wanted from a man. 

And then that had happened, and the world had shifted again. He was no longer the cold, untouchable North Star. He became James. He became someone who could achieve all his objectives with his famed, flawless skill, and still shudder at her touch.

And now he was this.  
James.  
Bucky.  
The soldier.  
All at the same time.  
For a woman who made a living shedding her skin, the shifts were something to marvel at. 

He was Bucky in this moment. She knew by the laugh. An open mouthed thing that was more like a shout. She couldn’t remember ever hearing that before he’d broken his conditioning. Before then, he’d laughed on occasion. The usual had been a huffed out breath with one half of his lips twisted. It’d fall somewhere between a laugh a a scoff and set the younger girls squirming for fear of being mocked. As if the Soldier mocked. Rarely, that sound had a reciprocal reply, an indrawn breath that turned the sound into sad clown of a laugh.

Steve sputtered, and tried to finish his story through his own laughter. Tears were caught in the corners of his eyes, and the two men were propped against each other like the compass pull was just too much to fight. James was flushed pink, holding one hand out to steady himself or halt the story. It didn’t matter, because they were together, and happy.

Her whole life was tangled through the history of a man who only half remembered her. 

She turned the page, not sure he was tracking her at all.


	3. Barnes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was inspired by coffee. I had originally thought this was going to be a card game.
> 
> The Bland Marvel Headcanon that got the ball rolling [here](http://blandmarvelheadcanons.tumblr.com/post/102401948683/after-spending-some-time-around-captain-rogers)  
> Title from the Airborne Toxic Event song

The easiest things could be difficult. Barnes knew it first hand. He hung back in the crowd, his shoulder propped fake-casually against one of the columns dividing the space. He didn’t even want to be there, but he was told they were all going.

“Just pick something. Or I’ll pick for you.” Sam’s voice had risen just enough to be part-annoyed, part-goading.

“You liked the one you got last time,” Wanda tried to help.

They had been at it for ten minutes. All the pushing set his teeth on edge. But he wasn’t Steve. If Steve didn’t care at all, he would have told someone else to decide in the first place. Instead, he would nod along politely, thanking them all for their input before doing what he wanted anyway. Barnes knew, because some things didn’t change in eighty years. No matter how many muscles Steve sprouted. 

“It’s not the end of the world, just pick something.” Sam stared at the ceiling, as if he was hoping for divine intervention.

Barnes knew he was glaring at them, but he chose not to stop. He wanted to tell them all to back off, but when he spoke their memories of the Soldier were too fresh to listen to what was left of the man.

“I really like the--” Clint pointed at the board.

“Boys,” Natalia shut him down with one cut of her eyes. “The last time he had coffee choices, it was ‘one sugar or two’. This isn’t the end of the world, right?” 

Clint didn’t argue. He just rolled his shoulders in a shrug, but a little half-smile played on his lips. They’d been lovers, Barnes was so sure. The archer had a wife and kids, but there was always before, and he knew Natalia. The two responded to one another like a natural team. 

Like they used to. 

“Well, you told ‘em.” Steve’s eyes were teasing when he smiled at Natalia before he turned back to talk to the very starstruck girl behind the counter. The girl was gesturing on a cup to explain the differences between a latte and a cappuccino.

Natalia gave Steve a bump with her hip, and placed everyone’s orders around him, in the quick patter of someone who knew how these types of things worked. Then, she paused and turned to Steve, so he could finally announce he had chosen one of the lattes off the chalkboard.

“See? Easy.” She patted Steve’s arm like a pal as she winked at the counter girl and tossed a twenty in the jar.

She’d been the two minute distraction for Steve. She’d deflected all the pressure with a joke, and handled the crew until he was ready to move.

James Barnes had made a life out of being Steve Rogers’ fallback plan. His safety net. Barens had taught Natalia so many things, but he’d never taught her to do that. He had taught her the opposite, hadn’t he? How to stay alive in a place where the only way to live was to sacrifice the softer, the weaker. How to turn every situation to her own advantage.

Instead, in this life, she stuck up for Steve. Clint was her friend, her equal. Steve was something other, something that needed protection. He needed someone to run interference for him. Who had taught her that, he wondered. 

“Here,” she said at his elbow. It didn’t surprise him. He had felt her move, but chose to stare ahead. It was better not to let her think he watched her. Worried about her. Barnes turned slowly to see she had a drink in each hand. She pushed one towards him. “Caramel latte.”

Same as Steve, she didn’t say, but she didn’t have to. She had to know he’d be listening. 

“Why?” If he’d wanted a drink, he would have gotten himself a coffee. 

“Gotta get the old guys up to speed.” Her fingers just brushed his when she handed off the paper cup. “And you always did have a sweet tooth.”

The only thing the Soldier had ever protected was her.


End file.
